Read Ebook: The Library of Work and Play: Housekeeping by Gilman Elizabeth Hale

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FACING PAGE A Playhouse Somebody Else Has Made 14 Tidying 52 The Account Book 90 The Broom Closet 140 Straight and Smooth 150 Air, Sun, and Water 156 Order and Daintiness 164 Cooking 274

PART I

THE PLAY-HOUSE

THE PLAY-HOUSE

WHEN I was walking in a garden the other day, I saw a play-house. And what do you suppose it was? A big tree with humpy roots which stuck out of the ground, and low branches which nearly touched the grass at the ends. You could not stand up straight in the house if you were more than three feet tall, but as the people who lived in the house were only about two feet eleven inches, they did not mind that.

You should have seen the china-closet. It was under a bent root, and all the dishes were white with violet markings. One might have thought they were big and little and middling-sized clam-shells, if one had not seen them in a china-closet.

There was a bedroom between two big roots. A doll was taking a nap there, not on a pine-pillow, but on a whole bed of pleasant-smelling pine needles which had dropped off a tree in the neighbourhood. The mistress of the house was in the kitchen cooking, and the kitchen, of course, was where the sun came through a break in the branches. One must have a patch of sun in a kitchen, for how can you bake without it? When I went into this kitchen, there was a cake baking, with an ornament on the top that looked quite like an acorn.

I was invited to stay for lunch, and I will tell you what we had: First, there were brown-bread cutlets, and smooth white stone potatoes, and a wonderful salad made of maple leaves and pepper-grass. Then for dessert we had the cake I had seen baking, and milk. The cake had a brown layer made from the garden beds and a yellow layer made from the path, and was iced with white sand. You will guess that the brown bread cutlets and the milk were what people getting up plays call "practicable," which is just a grown-up word for "really and truly."

The little girl's big sister put up some pictures on the sloping wooden walls to suit each room. One of them is very useful when the little girl is deciding what to play. It is seven little pictures on a card with verses to explain them. You can read the verses at the beginning of this chapter; I am sorry the pictures are not there, too.

This little girl likes especially to play "Monday, I wash my dollies' clothes"--because she has a tub and a washboard, and a wringer that will really let buttons through, and clothespins and a clothes-horse, and all the garret to put up lines in. Housework, you know, is so much more fun if you have the right things to do it with.

"Tuesday, I neatly press them," is a good day, too, but "Wednesday, I mend their little hose," is not. One cannot sit still and make believe sew, for many minutes. When mother was told about this trouble, she looked at the pictures and said, "Why, there's no sweeping day! As soon as the stockings are mended on Wednesday, you had better sweep, and tidy things up a little." Mother often wants things "tidied up" when it isn't in the game. She says, she does not keep her little girl's hat on the dining table, nor leave her bed unmade, and she cannot have the dolls brought up that way either.

The Friday game is one of the best. The two dolls that have night dresses are most often sick. Of course, it is a great care to have a doll sick, but it does make a great many interesting things to do. She may need cold-water cloths, or a hot-water bottle, or a poultice, and there is always medicine to give and meals to serve on a tray. Then the bed should be made over often. The little girl who lives in this play-house likes to have her dolls ill when she has company, because then there is some one to be the doctor.

"Saturday something or other," usually means cooking, and that, too, is a favourite game for company. Sometimes the little girl goes down into the "really and truly" kitchen to market, or sometimes mother sends up a little cake baked in a doll's pan. That makes a very grand occasion. The table must be laid with all the dishes, and napkins if possible, when there is a cake from the big kitchen.

A great many things can happen in a garret play-house, besides housekeeping. Sometimes it is so still up there, that one knows one must be in a deep forest, or out on the plains; and, of course, in that case, the cooking or nursing may be interrupted by a band of robbers, or an attack from Indians, or one may have a visit from an escaping prisoner, and besides, there are always long, dangerous journeys to take through the garret. In fact, every time one hears a new story, something unusual is likely to happen in the play-house.

Have you a play-house? I hope you have. Nowadays, when rents are so high, and when many people live in flats and apartments, it is often hard to get a play-house, but it can usually be managed in some way. If we have a nursery or a play-room all our own, then it is easy to have a play-house. We only have to get mother, or nurse to give us a corner to fix as we like, and to advise us about sorting things. Perhaps they will let us make the whole room into a play-house, but we really can keep house nicely in a much smaller space than that. The great point is to get the things together which belong together. If the bedroom things stand together, that is all we need to have a bedroom, and if the kitchen things are together, there is the kitchen. If we have a dining table, why, there is the dining room, and our living room can be anywhere where mother likes us to have most of the chairs.

But even if we have not a play-room we can still have a house. I know some clever dolls and their mother who keep house in the cupboard part of an old-fashioned washstand. The way they manage is to make the cupboard any room they wish to use. Monday morning it is a laundry, and every night it is a bedroom, and if they give a luncheon it is a dining room, and Saturday it is a kitchen. They keep the furniture which does not suit the room they are using in the drawer of the washstand which is over their heads.

I know another family who live under a dressing table. The legs of the table show where the corners of their house are, and they change the room into anything they need it for, as the other people do.

One little girl I know, whose name is Esther, lives in a flat and has only a bureau drawer for her housekeeping things. This is quite hard, for it means so much packing and unpacking, and parting with things she would like to keep when the drawer gets too full. She has to take her two dolls and a few things she thinks they will need into the parlour or the bedroom and play house there. In the bedroom, she plays it is night, because it is always nearly dark in there. Her mother lets her play with her big grown-up beds and chairs and stoves and irons. If she did not, Esther would have a hard time keeping house for her dolls.

But it is not always the people who live in flats who have not room for their things, is it? Sometimes after Christmas, or a birthday, one just feels as if one were trying to keep house in a toy shop. The best cure for this trouble is to give things away. Because--it is dreadful to think about--there are people who have no dolls: and there are people who have not so much as a tin cup to begin housekeeping with; and there are little girls who have real babies to look after, and real meals to cook who would just dearly love to have the games and toys that have to be packed away in closets and drawers because their owners have so many other things.

Once there was a little girl whose family moved into a smaller house. There was not room in her new play-house for the many things she had in her old one. Some of them had to be given away. One decision was so hard to make that she remembered about it after she was a grown-up woman. There was a little green wagon with yellow wheels, which she had always had, and which her older sisters had played with before she was born, and there was a little orange-coloured cart with four red wheels, which her father had brought out from town, a week or two before, filled with soap.

Two wagons were too many for the new play-house, and mother said keep the green one, because the other was only an "advertisement"; and the older sisters said keep the green one, because it was better and they had played with it; and father just smiled and said, "You must decide."

When no one was looking, the little girl took the little orange-coloured wagon with four red wheels, and the big letters round the outside, which made it an "advertisement," and put it in the box mother was packing for some other children, and it hurt so to do it that she could not quite help crying.

Some of us are troubled more with having too few things than too many, are we not? We can make a game of getting out of this trouble. We must all be discoverers and inventors, and if there is something needed in the play-house, we must keep our eyes wide open to see what else will do or what we can find to make into the thing we want. It spoils the hunt, and the surprise, if some one else tells you what to do, but one or two little things will show what the game is like. For instance, if it is a bed you need, try a strong pasteboard box, not very deep. If you mind its having no legs, then you must go on a journey and have it a berth on a car or a ship.

A cigar-box makes a good trunk for a small doll, especially the boxes which have trays in them. A doll with a cigar-box trunk will never have moths in her clothes.

Paper napkins are useful for dolls' tablecloths, and for napkins when they are cut into small squares. They will even do for sheets, if mother cannot spare us white "pieces" that are big enough. A bandanna handkerchief, or a scrap of bright calico, makes a good bedquilt.

Shells we have brought home from a day at the beach are convenient for dishes. Radiators are splendid stoves. And did you ever find out how much closet room there is under a bed? With the help of a few pins, one can hang all the dolls' clothes from the springs, and shut them in with the counterpane, if it happens to be a long one. But if mother does not want you to do this, you mustn't.

Sometimes, when we have played a good while in the play-house, we feel tired, and if it isn't a nap we want, perhaps it is that we would like to go and play in a play-house somebody else has made. We need not take a journey to do this, we only need some one to tell us a story, or a story-book to read to ourselves. We might choose to read "Cinderella," for that is the princess of housekeeping stories, or it may be that we will find one we like, if we go on reading this book.

IRISH STEW

Do you ever have Irish Stew for luncheon? Most Irish Stews are a good deal alike, but this is the story of one that was different.

Once upon a time there was an Irishman who lived in a little two-roomed hut on the edge of a bog. All day, he cut peats in the bog, for that is the way he made his living. It was not a very good living; in fact, he was very poor indeed. At night, when he came back to the hut, there were often only a few potatoes for supper, which he boiled in a pot over the fire. His old father had died a few years before, and that was the reason he lived alone.

One chilly, foggy night, the Irishman had come home late through the wet and the dark, and lighted his fire. There was very little for supper, and he had not had a chance to cook that, when Thump! Thump! came a knock on the door. He was ever so frightened, but he thought it would be better to open the door than have it thumped in. When he did open it--Preserve us! there were five big robbers with knives, and pistols, and high boots and fierce, bright eyes. They all crowded into the little hut, and threw more peat on the fire and demanded supper. The Irishman apologized, and said he had only potatoes. The robbers said they had to have something better than that, and all five of them laid their five big knives on the table with a look which meant, "Supper or your life!"

The Irishman went into the other little room and sat down on a chest to think. There was nothing in the room but the chest, and nothing in the chest but a few old clothes, and the more he tried to think, the less he was able to do it. At last, for no reason at all, he opened the chest. In it lay an old cloak, which his father had worn forty years and more.

No sooner had he seen it, than he went back to the room where the robbers were, and they saw him take the pot into the little room, and very soon come back and put all the potatoes into it and some water, and hang it over the fire, which was now so hot and bright that the pot soon began to boil. It simmered, and bubbled and steamed and soon the robbers began to sniff their supper. It did not smell like anything they had ever had before, but was not bad for a cold, foggy night. Pretty soon the Irishman set the pot on the table, and the robbers ate heartily. The Irishman was busy arranging something near the door. All of a sudden, one robber choked. He choked, and choked, and two others beat him on the back. He coughed and coughed, and then, something flew out of his mouth. It was a button.

The Irishman turned up his eyes to the roof and said, "Ah me, that is the last of a good old cloak." Before the robbers could move, he had opened the door and disappeared into the fog.

KING ALFRED AND THE CAKES

A good while ago there was a king of England named Alfred. He was a great and good king, but in spite of this, he had many enemies, who tried to take his kingdom away from him. Once, after a battle, the country was so overrun with his enemies, that he had to separate from his followers and go away in disguise. You would never have guessed he was a king when he started, and when, after he had wandered a few days in the forest, he came to a cowherd's hut, he looked like a hungry, ragged beggar. The cowherd and his wife gave him supper, and let him stay all night, and gave him some breakfast next morning. After breakfast, he sat for a long time looking into the fire, thinking of his kingdom, and of the dangers and sorrows of his people. The cowherd's wife was a hard-working woman, and it provoked her to see a great big man dreaming over the fire all the morning. She said to herself, "If he has no work of his own to attend to, he shall just help with mine." She put some meal cakes on a board to bake before the fire, and told the King to watch them carefully while she went out to feed the pig.

The King said he would watch them, but he kept on thinking about his army, and the heavy taxes, and by and by the woman came back.

There was smoke in the room, but she could see that the stranger was still sitting beside the fire, and that her cakes were burned to cinders. My, my, but she was angry. She boxed her guest's ears soundly, little dreaming that she was laying hands on the Sacred Person of the King, and might be hanged for it. The King, however, took her blows and her scolding, for he was very sorry he had let the cakes burn.

Afterward, when he had driven out his enemies and was at home again in his own castle he told what a scolding he had got for thinking about his troubles when he should have been baking the cakes.

ROAST PIG

Long ago, longer than you can even imagine, nobody in the world knew how to cook. People were not as dreadfully hungry on that account as you might think, because, you see, they ate their food uncooked. No one had ever cooked, and no one had ever thought of it; no one had ever eaten cooked food, and no one knew how pleasant it tasted.

This is the story of the way a little Chinese boy found out how to roast pig.

His name was Bo-bo and he had been left at home by his father, Ho-ti, to look after their hut, and their one big pig, and their nine little pigs. Bo-bo, was fond of playing with fire, and what did he do but set fire to some straw, and that set fire to the hut, and burned it down. A much more serious matter was that the one big pig and the nine little pigs were burned along with the hut.

Bo-bo was dreadfully frightened when he saw what he had done. He knew his father would beat him, and he began to cry. He also poked round among the ruins of the hut, though he did not hope to find anything. As he was turning over the embers, he found one of the little burnt pigs, and tried to pull it out. It was very hot, and burnt his hands, and he did just what you or I would have done--put his burnt fingers in his mouth.

The instant his hands reached his mouth, Bo-bo forgot all about being burned. He licked his fingers, but not because they hurt him. He did not know why he did lick them, but he kept on. Neither he nor any one else in the world had ever tasted such a wonderful taste.

Pretty soon, it came to him that it was the pig which tasted so delicious, and no sooner had he thought this, than he sat down in the ruins of the hut and began to eat great pieces of the little burnt pig. While he was making the best meal he had ever had in his life, his father came home, and when he saw that the hut was burnt down and that his son was eating some horrible food that no one else had ever eaten before, he began to beat Bo-bo with the stick he had in his hand. But Bo-bo did not seem to feel it. He hunted in the ashes for another pig and thrust it into his father's hands. Then the same thing happened which had happened to him. The pig burned Ho-ti's fingers and he put them in his mouth, and after that he had no time to think of beating any one, but sat down with his son in the ashes and made a good dinner.

From that time on, whenever they had little pigs, they burned down their hut to roast them. When the neighbours found it out, they thought it very wicked of Ho-ti and Bo-bo to eat burnt pig, but as soon as they were persuaded to taste it, they changed their minds, and then everybody was burning down his house in order to roast his pigs. After a long while, some one found out that one could cook without burning one's house down, which I am sure you will agree was a great discovery.

--Some day, when you go to school, you will have this story given to you to read--for a lesson!

THE KING'S KITCHEN

When King Arthur was King of England, a boy named Gareth, was growing up in a castle far away from Camelot, the King's city. But he had two brothers who were at Court, and who were Knights of the Order of the Round Table, and when they came home, now and then, Gareth asked them more questions than you could count about the King and his knights, and the Court, and tournaments, and battles. Every day, he rode and practised with lance and sword, and exercised in all ways that would make him strong and skilful with arms. And always he tried to be brave and to be gentle toward weak things and to tell the truth. And the reason for all this was that, more than anything else in the world, he longed to be in the service of the King, and to be a Knight of the Round Table.

As Gareth grew older, and more and more worthy to be made a knight, his mother, Bellicent, sorrowed and grieved. Her husband was very, very old, and her two elder sons had gone away to the Court, and she could not bear to have Gareth leave her, for he was the youngest and last. Though she saw that his heart's desire was to be with the King, yet she felt as if her heart would break if he went. She tried to make him especially happy at home; she tried to persuade him that he was not skilful or brave enough to be a knight; she told him of dangers and wounds, and besought him not to go. Again and again he asked her permission to go away and earn his knighthood; again and again she refused.

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